June 15, 2005
Feed Awareness API
We had no idea how popular the little FeedCount chicklet would be when we released it a few months ago, but popular it was and popular it is. But why should we be the only ones who get to make cool little Feed Awareness widgets? And aren't there lots of cool things other services could provide if our publishers chose to share their feed metrics? Well, one doesn't ask rhetorical questions unless one has answers.
Introducing the simple Feed Awareness API that now enables any 3rd party to query feed statistics on FeedBurner feeds. If you publish your feed through FeedBurner, we now provide another publicize option to activate the Awareness API for your feed. We are very excited that NewsGator, Rojo, and podcasting services Odeo, Podcast Alley and Podfeed are planning to support the FeedBurner API in order to provide their subscribers with more detailed feed information and metrics. We look forward to working with these and other service providers to integrate Feed Awareness capabilities as we simultaneously continue to extend the API in order to provide additional awareness metrics.
If you currently publish your feed through FeedBurner, you may need to explicitly enable public access to your feed statistics via your feed's publicity settings within FeedBurner. We have only activated api access by default for those feeds which use the FeedCount publicity tool, as these feeds are already promoting their stats publicly. Publishers can activate (or deactivate) this capability at any time.
This is how it all starts. First, a little counter with digits whizzing past. Then, a growing API to tap a range of feed reach measurements. Next thing you know, it's all floating cities and bubblecars as far as the eye can see. More to come.
Comments
We at podfeed.net are very excited about implementing this new feature. If you haven't done so already, come over to our directory and submit your podcast!
Looks great! But how does a non-geek make sense of this and implement it?
Hey LoM,
We're hoping to post quite a few more how-to-by-example entries to the existing Awareness API documentation ( http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/api/awareness ) in the near future. We admit the technology as-is does cater a bit heavily to your/our inner geek; we do want to make it more accessible to folks who want to play with the numbers but don't feel like learning about a given web publishing technology's finer points. Right now, calls to AwAPI return XML that contains your requested awareness data; this implies that you'll take care of processing that XML in some way, which is a minor irritant at best and a tedious task at worst.
We plan to offer some "wrapper" code libraries that make actually using the data we return in popular publishing tools and web technologies that much easier. A little bit of curiosity and eagerness to learn some programming techniques will always serve you well with APIs such as this one, but we should make sure that you don't have to do any more housekeeping than necessary just to get numbers you can use.
Thanks for the feedback!
So... how long until someone creates a Dashboard Widget that utilizes the Feed Awareness API? Cool stuff.
Great feature. I love it.
Here's a couple of feature requests. Allow for just a simple count response so the XML doesn't need to be parsed (e.g. just get a URL that displays the subscriber count like the chiclet does) That would allow for much wider usage.
Give a montly average feature. Getting yesterday's as a default is great and I like the date range options. How about something like "last month" though to save me some math :)
Hey guys,
So glad you got that working! I've been wanting that for a while. I would love it if places like Podcast Alley would use these stats instead of the votes. I don't want to call podcast listeners lazy, but... that's why I subscribe instead of hunting and clicking. Voting is another impossibly time-consuming chore that would take away precious hours of sleep time! Maybe now we podcasters will get a beneficial reordering of the hierarchy!
(Now to go get more listeners so I don't look like a fool...)
hey dick
nice work you're doing.
videobloggers of the world unite through feedburner!
your TED blog clinic friend,
ryanne
I can't seem to get my blog from here online. I set up a blog with blogger and I thought it was set through "feed burner". Could someone please give me some pointers as to how I can do this. I'm in the middle east and I've got some stories I would like to be published through a blog. If anyone knows how to do this... which I'm sure there are... I would really appreciate a few pointers as to how this really works. Getting a blog published on here. I have followed all of teh directions and I thought it would post immidiately. Then I thought after a few days, but now I don't seem to be having much luck. Any suggesstions?
It's very interesting. I'd like to see you provide additional APIs. Aggregators could auto-detect Feedburner feeds and uplevel themselves to provide more end-user functionality.
Though I have to admit that having centralized feeds like this *does* make me a bit nervous still.
feedbuner add all the feed feature in to a whole family..
I was pretty damned amazed to see my podcast with what I thought to be a measly 600-odd subscribers ranked at 41. (Not that I regard any of my listeners as measly!!)
Then, when I thought about it, I realized this: The only podcasts who are being ranked at places like podfeeder are those of us with the API turned on.
--Which begs the question...
How many feedburners have turned on the api?
-jon
